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Of the many Democrats running for president, only one has won tougher gun laws in the aftermath of a mass shooting in his state. So on Sunday — after massacres not quite 13 hours apart in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio — John Hickenlooper’s mind drifted to 2012.

He was Colorado’s governor that year, when 12 were killed and 70 injured at a movie theater in Aurora. The gunman used several legally-obtained weapons, including a semiautomatic rifle with a 100-round barrel magazine. A few months later, just as Hickenlooper was wrestling with what kind of gun control could pass his state legislature, 26 were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

“That was the same kind of one-two whammy,” Hickenlooper said Monday in a telephone interview with BuzzFeed News. “It was similar. It wasn’t quite as intense as this weekend was.”

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“Crises always bring about a window of opportunity” to sell gun control, former Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican who is friendly with Hickenlooper and who advocated with little success for stricter gun laws in his state before leaving office, told BuzzFeed News on Monday. “With John, they had the Aurora shooting.”

“Now with the latest killings — now that we’re heartbroken,” Kasich added, “there could be change.”